


Spinning Dust in an Untidy Dark

by Zarrene Moss (Menzosarres)



Series: Glass Silence [3]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: AKA The Loose Ends No One Called Me Out For, But I Called Me Out For, Discord: Bellamione Cult, F/F, So They Had To Be Tied, The Ones I Wrote For The War
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-02-21
Updated: 2019-02-23
Packaged: 2019-11-01 16:14:04
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 11,251
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17870507
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Menzosarres/pseuds/Zarrene%20Moss
Summary: Their world kept ticking along well after the rest stopped watching.





	1. Twisting to the Sun

**Author's Note:**

> There was definitely a time when I thought I would rather bury the scandalfic than give it another second of my time, but between a long-over discord war and the wonderful Quelquun (who I've unfortunately neglected correspondence with as my work life has become my whole life), several between-time snippets were requested and written, and the scandalfic lived on. 
> 
> I don't know that I'd call these any more "canon" than the alternate ending. Parts of seven exist. They're shorts and scenes that fall between the last chapter and the epilogue or after it. They were written in October. Some of them for strange and/or halloween-themed prompts and challenges. (If you really want to see my odd content from the war, ask me about the Romeo and Juliet AU or The Arm Fic.) All of them were written _fast_. 
> 
> Most interested parties already had access to these in their speed-written tinydocs form, but I kept swearing I'd post them when I got around to editing, and that... kept not happening. But you know what? If the author can't write questionable quality follow-up nonsense to a nonsense fic, who the hell can. 
> 
> Today, I got a fun PM reminding me that it's been exactly a year since I finished the fic and I decided, hey. Edited or not, these snippets make a perfectly serviceable anniversary present. I'll post one tonight, the rest in my next spare minutes. Happy first birthday, longfic from hell. Here's a taste of what happened After (and Between).

Rare were the days with Bellatrix when Hermione did not experience a first. A first time spotting another human in a thirty-minute staring contest with a dull-feathered country pigeon on the other side of their kitchen window. A first time a black-robe bumped her shoulder in the Ministry atrium and apologized with something like fear in his eyes, apologized a second time, even, as he nervously wrung his kraken-ink-black tie and backed away instead of glaring as though she’d been the one in the wrong. A first new-moon midnight swimming blind in a charmed-warm sea, laughing and fearless of drowning or anything in the depths. A first time waking from a nightmare to see a shadow in doorframe clutching a gleam of a knife, as ready to carve up her gasp of terror as any intruder.

The first time she saw Bellatrix become a crow was the first time she thought it could last.

It was the pigeon day. After breakfast, when the clatter of bowls in the sink spooked it away, Bellatrix lingered by the half-open glass. She was eyeing the beautiful day outside with the extreme grumpiness at things which caused others joy which Bellatrix could manifest like none other—an extension and subversion, Hermione suspected, of her equally strong inclination towards schadenfreude—when a strong breeze blew the shutters in and sent Hermione’s papers scattering from the study to the dining room and through several rooms between.

Hermione’s misfortune never failed to amuse her half to death. Laughter sparked a better mood, one she failed to shake even in the face of a balmy twenty-two degrees, clear skies, and brilliant sunshine. She lazed against the window as Hermione scrambled around after her work.

With a smirk, she caught a page beneath her bare toes. She pinned it to the floorboards where it fluttered, white and helpless, as Hermione reached to scoop it up. Instead, Bellatrix scrunched her toes with a sad crinkle and kept it trapped.

“Could I get that back, please?” she asked, looking up in exasperation.

“What’s the magic word?”

“I _said_ please.”

“That’s not it!” Bellatrix denied her with glee.

Hermione stood in a huff, palms braced on her thighs, but Bellatrix took advantage of her distraction, kicking the paper up towards her hands—

Only to watch as breeze picked up again, ripped it from her grasp, and sent it soaring out the window.

“Bellatrix!”

She had the good grace to look embarrassed for all of a pigeon-blink before the pink tint in her cheeks turned to a frown of determination and, as Hermione watched in shock that quickly turned to awe, she lifted her arms, folded in on herself, and vanished through the window in a streak of black feathers, leaving a heap of black clothing behind on the chair.

The paper she returned was… less than pristine. It had a rather dramatic puncture wound in the edge where she’d grabbed it with her beak and several unfortunate wrinkles around the signature line left by her toes, but return it she did, and Hermione took it from her in cautious amazement when she landed back on the sill. She’d hear no complaints on rumpling, not with the other considerations she had to handle first.

She was a rather _large_ crow.  

Full-bodied, gleaming in the light, talons sharp and dark and spanning the full breadth of the windowsill. “Well aren’t you beautiful,” Hermione whispered.

Bellatrix preened.

It took the bird-witch shoving her head beneath Hermione’s tentatively outstretched palm for her to take the risk of touching her, stroking her head, following the grain of her feathers with two cautious fingers along the gentle slope of her back, but she was silk-smooth, soft and warm from the sun, and Hermione could not stop smiling. “How is it you don’t do this more often?”

Watching a crow shrug was an odd thing, but not as odd as it might have been on another animal—a scorpion, perhaps.

“Do you like flying?” Hermione asked, genuinely curious.

Bellatrix cocked her head, side-eyed the window, then dove back out into the sun.

Hermione watched her ride the currents of the sea breeze for hours. She leaned out the open window, utterly neglectful of her papers scattering themselves throughout the house behind her, too entranced by the sleek streak of midnight in a jewel-bright midday sky, flying like she’d been born from the clouds.

Never had Hermione seen a place in which Bellatrix fit as well as this; all other spaces seemed to cow and cave around her, bending to accommodate the mésalliance with an indomitable witch ill-suited to their simple ways, but the sky bowed for no one, and held her aloft.

When the breeze settled, she returned and perched on Hermione’s shoulder. Heavy, but not unmanageable for the task of keeping company while she finally tamped down her wonder, shutter-bolted them back indoors, and attended to the mess. She fussed at Hermione’s hair, beak sharp but careful, as she gathered papers and reordered her desk. The absent preening was… nice. Peaceful. Companionable. Two words she rarely found cause to consider with human-Bellatrix in the room.

If they could keep at this, keep doing this—and, with the sheer joy of the perfect weather intoxicating her sense of positivity, Hermione truly believed they could—keep finding new sorts of balance in their days and their lives together, this could… work. The real way. The lasting way.

Even if Bellatrix slept half nights in a chair instead of a bed. Even if Bellatrix’s shadow in her room after a nightmare sparked more nervous chills than comfort. Even if Bellatrix was an absolute menace of a witch who taunted her with her own paperwork and a brat of a bird who left holes in its most important paragraphs and a tease of a lover who—upon return to human form, naked as the day she was born—still managed to find a last stray of the scattered pages to dangle from two fingers over Hermione’s head from every added inch of height the kitchen stool she stood upon would give her as she repeated, “What’s the magic word, pet?” until Hermione gave up, stopped trying to hop and grab it and muttered in resignation, “Yours.”

“Mine,” Bellatrix agreed, tossing the paper back to the stack in Hermione’s filing tray with a flick of her wand as she swept down from her perch, took Hermione in her arms, and steered her back to the bedroom.

Yes, yes, even if. Yes, even then. Yes, yes, it could last for that, too. 


	2. Anything Other

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> a first half; you'll note the missing chapter three. the rest of this lives there, someday; feel free to skip it until it does.

A few weeks under a year since they'd moved into the house, Hermione noticed Bellatrix had spent a day in unusual reserve. 

The quiet hadn't been all that noticeable during the day. She'd had work to take care of, a study to hole up in, food to cook, an owl roost to clean... But as the sun set and late-evening shadows from the trees outside danced on the floor, the stillness of the living presence sharing her walls grew harder to ignore. 

"What has you so distracted?" she asked as half of her supper disappeared in silence, and Bellatrix's remained untouched. 

She couldn't decide if it was surprising that Bellatrix seemed to have been expecting the question. 

"I've been thinking of doing something very cruel to you." 

Hermione stilled, fork halfway to her mouth. She set it down. Stared at her. What could she say to that? How did anyone respond to that? I'd rather you didn't? I enjoy kindness, really? But you're you, you're Bellatrix Black, so if you're going to do it, I doubt there's anything I could do to stop you? 

But they'd lived together nearly two years, now, and Hermione had learned a thing or two in that time.

"What would it be?" she asked instead. It seemed the safest choice. Best not to protest, because then Bellatrix might take offense that Hermione actually thought she would do it, but best not act as though she'd already decided not to, either, because that would be presumptuous, and Bella might take it as a challenge instead. 

She seemed to have made the right choice. Bellatrix rapped her wand against her lip and eyed her with the same measuring stare that had followed her through the stillness all day, humming slightly to herself. 

It had been a restless few nights, Hermione realized. There were less nights in chairs, these days, which meant when Bellatrix left, she noticed—a sudden absence of warmth, the soft padding of bare feet through a smoothly swung door, the wash of moonlight snuck into the bedroom from the uncurtained window at the end of the hall—but she also noticed when, after only a few minutes or a rare stretched hour, Bellatrix returned, skin chilly, smelling faintly of the soil, the sea breeze, or fresh ash. 

For several nights, Hermione had woken to departure, but not return. 

"I've been thinking about an... anniversary present. Of the day you took my magic." 

Suddenly, Hermione had a very strong suspicion what cruelty Bellatrix had in mind. 

"You've never felt it. What you did to me." She licked her lips. "What I've done to... some of them. Never been locked off from yourself like that, have you?"

_Only when your bird left me without a working wand for several days in the Manor. Only the days before I knew I could do wandless magic. And only before that, long before, when I knew hardly any magic at all, might go days, weeks without casting a single spell. And only after, when you took my wand from me again._

But of course, it wasn't the same. Wasn't why she was thinking of doing this. And so—

"No. I haven't," Hermione agreed. "And it would be a little cruel," she was careful to say, "but I wouldn't hate you if you did. If it means something to you, you can." 

 


	4. The Same Old Lines, The Same Old Stories

Letters from Narcissa were strange for the two of them. They both received them. Bellatrix read them all, and Hermione never tried to stop her. Sometimes, when Hermione was penning her reply, Bellatrix would toss an offhand comment her way, and she would always add it in, postscript from Bella, but those were all the words she ever sent back. Hermione did not read Narcissa's letters to Bellatrix, and Bellatrix did not reply to them. They came with the owl, were opened by the fireplace, then vanished in smoke at the tip of Bella's wand, often becoming the first kindling of the eve. 

They both liked having a fire in the hearth. 

One such letter-bearing evening, Hermione found herself home alone when the bird came in. Bellatrix was out in the garden in the late autumn air, preparing for the onset of winter—the plants did not need preparation, but Bellatrix did. She grew restless in the cold and the snow, resenting forced hibernation, and Hermione was glad to let her take her autumn sunsets for as long as she could, even if it meant increasingly cold toes crawling under her blanket on the couch when she came in at last to join Hermione and her book by the fire. 

But it also meant, tonight, that she held two letters in hand without Bellatrix peering over her shoulder. Owls usually came mid-morning from their cross-coastal flight. Mornings belonged to the both of them; evenings were taken alone. Of course she would never open Bellatrix's letter. That breach of trust was well beyond her. But the thought that she was hesitating to open her own mail because Bellatrix wouldn't like it suddenly irked her. She shoved her thumb under the edge of the flap. Slid it down. Snapped Narcissa's emerald-wax seal. 

_My dear Hermione,_

_Yes, to your last. Winter found us first. My fault for choosing the mountains, but even a too-early snow is beautiful, here. Please enjoy the last of fall for me._

_I saw something today that reminded me of you. Or, of something the two of us never quite finished, back before I stole you away from our peaceful, everyday coexistence and dragged you into my mess of a love life._

She smiled over the page. Narcissa's handwriting had grown less tight, less formal as the months had passed, and with the slower, looser loops of her letters had come a looser tongue for talking about their past. These were check-ups, yes; and Hermione never minded being the go-between that let these two distant sisters be assured the other was safe (enough) and happy (enough) despite neither of them being the kind to say such in so many words, but these were also friendship, to her. She was glad they could talk lightly about what they had done together. She was glad distance had not closed Narcissa off from her for good. 

_It was, of all things, white rabbits. Three of them, out by the bird feeder, like ghosts in the snow. Little pink noses and dark, blinking eyes, but otherwise, they had the same ghostly way of fading into their surroundings as an animal made of light, and joy, and magic. Did you ever find yours? I can only guess you must have, with all you've accomplished with that_ _incomparable_ _power of yours, but I do regret I wasn't able to find it with you, finish our little lesson. I'd have liked to have seen what it is._

Hermione blinked over the words several times, stunned to realize how thoroughly she'd forgotten. She'd tried, hadn't she—in the library—with Narcissa—before... everything. But she'd never tried since. That had been it. One day of almost punctured by the pain of learning her father had passed, and she'd... almost painted over it in her own mind, untethered grief blacking out the whole day and the cautious sparks of silver right along with it. 

_My family has a strange relationship with the Patronus charm. You've seen my hawk. Andromeda's was a heron, though I've not seen it in decades. My grandmother's—an egret. I never saw my mother's, but I suspect, could she or Bella have ever found the memory to cast one, they'd have been feathered, too. Black family birds. Graceful things with claws; forever flying away._

Hermione lingered over the words. She paused to turn the coals, shuffling the metal poker through the ashes by hand. Certain things still spoke to her instinct to stand, and cross, and bend, and do, rather than flick a wand at from the couch. She trailed her blanket behind her as she returned, bundled up against the open-window chill. That was the best thing about a fire on a night like this. The point wasn't to keep warm, but to light up the air, to celebrate the taste of looming frost drifting in from the great  _out there._

With the birds and Bellatrix, and the other flying away things. 

_Write me your best new memory, if you would. And your silver creature, if you have one. I've been undone with curiosity since the rabbits were spooked away by a fox. Are you a European rabbit? A bushy-tailed fox:_ renard _, here? Or something else altogether— I could see a touch of the sea in you, or freshwater, or the brush. I think that's just it. I see you as too much Hermione Granger to see what else might be inside of you. A bit of everything. Perhaps wings._  

_All my heart as always,_

_Narcissa._

"All my  _heart_  as  _always."_

Hermione twitched when Bellatrix's nasally mockery of her sister's voice lit the air behind her. 

"So it's secret midnight letters now, is it?" 

"Bella—"

Fingers still clad in gardening gloves snatched the page from her. "What else, hm?" 

"Bella, it's just—" 

"' _A bit of everything,"_ she continued, working backwards, plucking words like petals. 

"It's — just like — all the others." Hermione spoke over her. She didn't try to reclaim the letter. It had never been important that Bella not read it; just that she _could_ read it, read it first, here and now, beside the fire, because her life was her own. 

Bella stopped picking pieces and paused, frowning. Hermione watched as her eyes took to the top, then worked their way through it at a normal human reading pace. When she finished, she was scowling. 

"There's one for you, too," said Hermione cautiously. She wasn't sure what had caused the mood, but the room had gone from chilly to cold without a single shift in the weather. "I left it in the kitchen." 

With a huff, Bellatrix tossed the letter aimlessly towards the side table. "So, you wanted to make a little glowing friend, hm?" 

Hermione frowned. "I'm interested in being able to cast a Patronus, yes. Though I'd forgotten, really. Narcissa tried to teach me once, not all that long after we met." 

Bellatrix's face remained dark and cold. "Well then." She loomed over her on the couch. Hermione didn't like it when she got like this, when she used every inch of her significant height to make Hermione feel small. "Let's see it." 

"Excuse me?" 

Bellatrix picked up Hermione's wand from the table behind her head and jabbed her in the stomach with it. "C'mon then." 

It could have been playful, but the wand let off sparks, a clear sign of unrest from its handler. It was like getting shocked, and Hermione sat up with a wince, rubbing away the prickles as she took her wand if for no other reason than to avoid any more poking and prodding and static sting. 

"I just told you. I've never done it. I can't be expected to just—"

"Sure you can." Bitterness clung palpably to the words. "You're  _you_. You're the magic Mud—"

That she stopped shocked Hermione almost as much as the fact that she'd started to say it had hurt her. She'd giving up on coaxing her out of "pet" eons ago, but she really had thought, after this long, she'd almost gotten "Mudblood" out of her lexicon for good. 

"You're the girl who can do anything," she drawled instead, and Hermione still sensed the bitter, but there was an almost painful interest in it, too. 

"Are you going to keep scolding me, or are you going to step back so I actually have room to cast the thing?" 

Grumbling, Bellatrix chose the latter. 

* * *

 

It came as a genuine shock that it only took three tries.

One, distracted, thinking about very little beyond the half-forgotten words of the spell itself and the odd set of her wand in her hand, trying to scrawl a motion into the air when she'd gotten out of the habit of old spells, _normal_ spells, constantly flicking her own into being with a flare of color as she did these days. She and Bellatrix had all but reinvented magic in their cozy cliff-side home; remembering the way it was  _supposed to be done_  felt unnatural. Summoned nothing. 

Bellatrix laughed at the bemused look on her face, mistaking her wandering thoughts for surprise at failure. No, Hermione was not surprised that this was going to take some doing, but she was surprised to realize the kind of wildness they'd taken up between their walls. Magic flowed through and between and around them every day in ways the greater wizarding world would have largely considered impossible or, upon witnessing it, considered sub-societal, ill-mannered. Yet here she was, having all but forgotten her own worries over unbound magic. They breathed the stuff like air.

Living with Bellatrix had set her at peace with her power without her even noticing. How strange. How... lovely. 

Now if only she could set Bellatrix half as at peace with herself.  

"Aren't you going to try again?" 

Bellatrix's mocking didn't faze her. Best way to get her out of one of these moods? Cater, at least a little bit, but mostly just let her mock, and let her stew till she'd cooked in her anger long enough she was done and fit for consumption again. 

"Yes, I am." 

She did, this time bringing the spell to her lips and her wrist with ease, but her thoughts were still wandering oddly, fixed, now, on the image of Bellatrix's anger as a variety of different Bellatrix stews. Bellatrix soup — boiled hot and boiled fast — caution, cauldron scalding to touch. Hazardous to tongue. Wait several minutes before serving. Delicious once cool enough to eat. 

Bellatrix's cackle at her second failure grated a bit. Couldn't she see Hermione was having fond thoughts about her, and stop trying to get under her skin long enough she could enjoy them? 

"Oh, hush," she said, which had the counterproductive effect of making Bellatrix grin down at her, prowl closer, and murmur, "Make me." 

But it was this image—dark curls bent close, curtaining them in even as she bore backlight from the fire like a halo; lips dark and smile sharp as a blade and close enough to kiss were she willing to give in to the intended distraction—which instead sparked another memory of another time Bellatrix had caged her with her smooth, strong arms and the threat of kisses, even as she gifted her a beautiful, dizzy summer day. 

"Could you step back?" she asked gently. 

Bellatrix's brow furrowed, but she seemed to hear the concentration in Hermione's request, and reluctantly drew away. 

" _Expecto Patronum!"_  This time, as she cast again, Hermione pictured gold beneath water and midnight curls in full, brilliant sun. She felt that warmth on her skin, felt the warmth of Bellatrix's gaze, the warmth of her favor, too. 

And something silver — a streak, a blur — burst from the tip of her wand in a shower of knife-edge feathers. 

"Oh," she said as the crow wheeled once before the fireplace, sought an unpresent danger, and faded into stardust. "It's you." 

* * *

 

"Well, well." 

Her smile of achievement took a dent at the darker, smoother anger in Bellatrix's voice. 

"So it's a bird after all." 

She wouldn't look at her. She'd turned her back in the shower of sliver and now stared into the fire, shadows gathering around her like the cape wrapped about her shoulders for the evening in the garden, now unreasonably heavy for the room. 

"Not just any bird. It's—" 

But Bellatrix didn't wait for her to say it again, huffing loudly enough to cut her off. Hermione's smile was gone. 

"You're the one who wanted me to try. The least you could do is be—" 

"Cissy," Bellatrix grumbled.

Hearing the name said in anger made Hermione realize just how rarely it was spoken aloud between them.

"Cissy was the one. Not me. I couldn't care less about a— a—" 

But her sharp tongue failed her. When she couldn't find the words to dismiss the spell, she ground her teeth and settled on a snarl—

_"Where's my letter."_

—and Hermione was left, frowning and alone, as Bellatrix stormed off into the kitchen. 

In her wake, she rescued her own letter from the floor. Considered Narcissa's words. Considered Death Eaters and spells that drew on life itself. Considered Bellatrix Black. 

At last, she followed her. 

Bellatrix hunched over the table, glowering down at the paper she held. 

"Did you want to give it a try?" Hermione asked as casually as she could. 

Bellatrix speared her with a glare. "I did not." Her nails bit into the parchment. 

Hermione waited. Patience was not her strong suit, but sometimes worth the result. 

"What are you staring at?" At last, the silence burst. "What do you want, ay? You want to watch me fail? You want another go at it, laugh while I wave around my wand and my magic dis-o-beys? Haven't had enough of that, then? Because you know,  _the both of you know I can't."_  

There it was. 

"I don't know that," Hermione said, gentle but firm. 

Bellatrix rose, crossing the floor, a pained rage sparking in her eyes. "I — am — a —  _servant_ ," she hissed, "of the Dark Lord." She clawed up her sleeve, brandished the smudge of a faint ink-shadowed bruise all but obscured by his death and her multitude of scars. "We do not cast.  _Patronus charms_. We do not fear. Dementors. We do not need to chase them away. They should  _serve me_ ,  _bow_ for me." 

She took one step forward with every other word, backed Hermione right through the door and into the living room and straight up to the back of the couch where she leaned in, punctuated her words with the jab of her wand between Hermione's collar bones. 

"You were," she said. "But you aren't any longer. Who cares about Dementors when—"

She didn't realize she'd made a mistake until the pressure against her sternum doubled her backwards, pressed her hard into the backing of the couch. "You  _dare_  speak to me of my captors, my—" 

As the word left her mouth, she all but choked on it, eyes widening. 

"Your allies?” Hermione finished for her. "Once. And before that, your guards." She reached out, gently steered the wand aside. "Of course you care," she said, trying to put as much unspoken apology into those two words as she could. "I only meant... I don't think you should try the spell for them. You should try it because you like casting difficult spells. Aren't you curious?"

Bellatrix's eyes shifted. Her throat flexed. "It hardly matters." She sounded hoarse, suddenly tired. "Just what I said before. I  _can't_ , pet. None of us ever could. I chose darker curiosities. Gave things up. Let this be." 

Hermione reached for her, but Bellatrix shook off her fingers against her cheek. 

"Would you stop grabbing at me," she grumbled, and Hermione knew, then, the depth to which this would bother her if she did, in fact, let it be. 

"The Dark Arts," Hermione began. At the shift in tone, Bellatrix met her eyes again. "Maybe I just can't understand it because I never learned the way they teach you to avoid them in a classroom, but I've always wondered. Defense Against the Dark Arts... as though there's some... set, you know? What are they? The Unforgivable Curses? Those are three very different spells. And everything else is... Well, it seems to be a mix of who you are and how you use them that gets you branded a dark witch. But what, then, are the Light Arts?" She took up Bellatrix's wand hand in her own, turned it between her fingers, feeling bones move, knuckles slide under soft, faintly lined skin. "Why don't we learn them, explicitly? If there are spells so good you can only do them when you're pure of magic, or pure of intent, why is no one using them to see who's gone bad, why are we not taught them first, above all else?" She trailed a finger along the scars at her wrist. "I suspect we say these things like we say 'the boogeyman.' It scares you away from the dark, thinking there's something to lose besides conscience. And that's... well. I don't know that it's  _good_ for children, but I do know something's gone wrong when it's become so deep a part of our world that grown witches think they lose their ability to have a happy memory, just because they've had a brush with dark things in their past." 

Bellatrix was staring at her. Hermione could always feel it, the particular startled stare she got when Hermione rendered her speechless. She also knew to expect the snide remark that would surely follow. 

"How long've you been brewing that one up." 

She just smiled. "You know I like to think about things." 

Bellatrix’s lips twitched. "Like to say them, too." A tiny crinkling sound decorated the end of her words, and Hermione glanced down at her other hand. Narcissa's short note flipped right way up and down again, too quickly for Hermione to read. 

"Can I ask?" she asked, and Bellatrix failed to stifle a snort.

She dangled it in front of Hermione's eyes just long enough for her to read—

_Just give it a try, Bella._

Hermione blinked. Narrowed her eyes in suspicion. "She sent a late owl on purpose, didn't she." 

The corner of Bellatrix's eye twitched her agreement. "What did I ever do to deserve such atrocious sisters." 

Hermione choked on a laugh. "I can think of a few things." 

There were several seconds of wry smiles, one growing on the next, but slowly, Bellatrix's gaze sobered and she withdrew her wrist from Hermione's idle hold. "You breathe one word of this in your letter and I'll hex that owl into the afterlife." 

And before Hermione could defend Venze's honor—or his neck—Bellatrix had raised her wand, fine-tuned her glare, and spat out the most furious recitation of " _Expecto Patronum!"_ Hermione could have ever imagined. 

She waited until the wand was a little less... pointy... before she reached out and gently pressed down on Bellatrix's hand. "Hang on. Think first. Breathe through it. And... relax. You aren't torturing anyone." ... _but yourself._  

Bellatrix shot her a glare like she'd heard it. Still, she unclenched before the second try. She didn't shake off Hermione's hand. Then she waved, flicked, and said the words like she meant them. 

And the air remained lit only by fire. 

* * *

 

"Told you," Bella said. The anger wasn't in it, but Hermione didn't like the resignation left behind any better. 

"What, because you didn't get it in two? Please. It took me at least a dozen tries. That's... at least worth four from you." 

Lips twitched. "Three." 

"Alright, three, but—" She pressed down Bellatrix's wand again when she went to raise it. "—can we talk through it, first?" 

Bellatrix gave her the look, the one more effective than any roll of her eyes, the one she could hear the  _really, pet?_  in from the arch of her eyebrow alone, but she didn't protest. 

"If I promise to bake something special tomorrow, will you tell me what memory you were trying to use?" 

They were well past the exchange of stories for sustenance, but Hermione still liked to pull out the old bargain now and then, give Bella a chance to share something as a kind of trade, since she so rarely offered otherwise, even if, Hermione suspected, she did sometimes want to. 

"No." 

"No?" 

"No memory." 

Hermione frowned. "Well that's not going to work. The whole source of the spell is—" 

"—a single blithely cheerful, mind-numbing memory." 

Hermione tamped down on an exasperated laugh. Only Bellatrix could use four words to say "happy" and make it sound like the worst thing known to man. "It's joy. It's happiness. I think Narcissa warned me once it's really a couple of things: Joy, hope..."  _Love_ , she did not add. "But the point is its balanced, and it's strong, and you focus on it with everything you've got when you cast." 

"What was yours?" Bellatrix asked, and she asked with a particularly fragile sharpness; cracked ice the last barrier above curious depths below.  

Hermione answered with a very broad, very real smile. "Remember our spot? The pond in the forest?" 

Bellatrix's eye twitched. "Yes." She stretched out the word. "Almost thought you were going to let me take what I wanted right then and—"

Hermione flushed, and Bellatrix clicked her tongue through a smirk instead of finishing. 

"Yes, well, it's a messy memory, the best ones often are, but between the first day, when I just..."  _Watched you, for hours, in the sun. "..._ and the second, when you..."  _Apologized, and touched me like you saw me, even while you teased, even while you tried to push me away with your words. "..._ you showed me something beautiful. That place means... something to me. In some ways, I think we started. There. Then." 

To her surprise, Bellatrix remained quiet through her stumbling recollection. Hermione caught the faintest glint of gold in her eyes, something she had come to associate with both shared magic, and shared memory. Sometimes, she wondered in what strange ways of intangible things the two were so thoroughly entangled. 

As Bellatrix rolled her wand between her fingers once again, Hermione felt a tug, the faintest flush of power warming beneath the surface of her skin. Nostrils flared. Eyes narrowed, then the tension fell from the rest of her body, leaving only the tension of concentration in the set of her wrist, the sharpness of her stare. 

She cast again. Fragile silver sparks battled the fire's glow. 

"Oh," Bellatrix said, a small sound. Expressions warred on her face. Shock. Triumph. But Hermione saw the moment her instinct towards anger started to win, saw her picking up her wand again, felt that tug. 

"Bella, wait—" 

This time, it was a wash of light, and Bella's hand was shaking. There was a fierce mix of joy and anger in her eyes; Hermione suspected she knew why. She also knew, from experience, that trying too hard too quickly with this spell rarely went as one would like. She wouldn’t find her form tonight. But she’d done this, and this was so much. This was enough. This was astonishing. 

"Bella, you did it." She leaned up, pressed a quick, distracting kiss to her pouting lips, and stilled, there.

"Not yet," Bellatrix said against her. She clutched her wand against Hermione's shoulder, something between pulling her closer and pushing her away. "A light show, nothing more." 

But when she drew away, Hermione felt words pulled from her as though they'd been resting on a string tied to Bellatrix's lips. "Yes. Maybe. But Bella, I think… I _swear_ I saw a hint of wings." 

She said it not because she'd  _seen_ , precisely, because in truth there had been nothing but the ghost-blue silvers and sparks. But she said it because, as it sometimes did—not often, but sometimes, when Bellatrix was open to her, emotions and magic running close to the surface—the internal landscape of Bellatrix's power shimmered behind her eyes for a soap-bubble moment. Her flowers bloomed, untouched by the taste of frost out their window. Bella's green things grew. And, there, in the branches of a scraggly oak, stood her crow. Beside it: a glowing silver nest. Very much the silver blood that ran through the veins of this entire non-place; dirt, vines, and trees alike—but a little bit a different silver, a little bit blueish, too. Ghosted with the faintest brush of winter, like rabbits in the snow. 


	5. A Plot Picked Out So Many Years Ago

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> the cheesiest and halloweeniest of them all

"You didn't." 

"Iiiiiii did." 

"You didn't!" Hermione laughed. She tugged free of Bellatrix's hands, resting against her temples where they'd slid aside from covering her eyes on the way out here, and spun into the pumpkin patch. "How did you hide this for so long?" 

Bellatrix was trying very, very hard not to smile and failing miserably all the way. "I took some liberties," she said. "And made some highly suspect use of an... internal garden." 

Hermione blinked, stumbled over her own feet, momentarily distracted by the potential implications of that cryptic statement, but then she just let herself laugh and reached out to touch the nearest of the large, round, orange lumps that had thoroughly overtaken the west corner of the property at the edge of—and edging into—the woods along the drive. 

Bellatrix took no such care with her creations. She sat herself right on top of the nearest and largest of her pumpkin flock, skirts flaring around her. 

"I've heard," she said, sprawled in apparent comfort Hermione found questionable at best, "that a home-grown squash makes all the difference in a home-baked good." 

Hermione tried to put on a serious face. "You mean to tell me all this gardening was just some elaborate blackmail for more pumpkin bread?" 

"Hardly," Bellatrix drawled. "I strike a much harder bargain. Pumpkin scones, pumpkin bars... pumpkin pastries..." 

Hermione's lips twitched. "Hm. Not happy with this yet. No deal." 

"Excuse me?" It was still a playful ask, but Bellatrix's eyes had darkened as they always did while challenged, and Hermione got a pleasant chill that had nothing to do with the late October weather. 

"I want company in the kitchen," she said. "I want you—" She stepped closer, "—with me—" Closer still, "—for every torturous—" until she could rest each of her palms "—delicious—smelling—" on Bellatrix's thighs. "—minute of it." 

Bent at the waist, legs and spine straight, tip-toes risen upon for extra leverage, she leaned in and over and kissed her. Rarely did she have the occasion to be the one leveraging extra inches of height. She would take shameless, gleeful advantage of it. 

She loved being the one to start their kisses. Bellatrix tended to smile against her lips rather than return them for the first few seconds, and Hermione could tell it was half out of a smug satisfaction that Hermione was always eager to have her hands on her, half to prove some silly thing about her own restraint, but Hermione didn't mind that at all. The first was the truth, the second (as she knew from many, many late nights and many, many more inappropriate days) a complete fantasy, and besides: Every one of these smiles tasted real. That was a prize worth the lot. 

Bella's hands rose to her hips as she accepted the affection at last. The sun was thin, the air chilled in a way that teased the tips of her ears and nose, but Bellatrix's skin was always warmer than her own, or maybe just warmer against her. The sound of the sea from beyond the house faded away. She heard only the rustle of the breeze through the broad, low-lying leaves of the pumpkin vines and the roll of her blood rushing up her neck to greet Bellatrix's lips. She hummed, and Bellatrix's grip slid backwards until she could tuck her palms into the pockets of her jeans, pull her closer, and kiss her properly. 

It was a good several minutes before she let enough air between them to say, "I'm not sure I agree with this bargain." Teeth teased across her bottom lip without nibbling. "Are you sure you ought to tempt me like that?" 

It took several seconds for Hermione to remember the conversation at hand. The pumpkins around them were her saving grace. Bellatrix's kisses did things to her which her head did not entirely understand, things which seemed to make it want to just... stop, for a bit. Head off, thoughts off. Skin could do the thinking for a while. But rich, deep orange was enough an affront to her eyes to jog back a touch of brainpower. "I won't let you steal any batter. Not one bite. No ingredients either. No matter  _how_  good it smells." 

"Who said the temptation would be food?" 

Hermione yelped as a tug yanked her off balance. Her hands slid off thighs and into thin air, and only her knees banging against the side of the pumpkin-turned-throne prevented her from face-planting directly into Bellatrix's breasts. 

She snorted. 

"Well, that ruined  _that_  line!" Hermione spluttered, trying to stand up again, but Bellatrix had yet to relinquish her pockets. "Not romantic," she added. "And to think, right up until then I was going to let you lick the spoon." 

Lips twitched. She kept Hermione close as she strangled back the threat of laughter, determinedly schooling her face back into the cold, haughty smirk of a woman who intended to drive a hard bargain. "You won't bribe me with that, either. Silver spoons, carving knives, cinnamon and cloves," she hummed. "Oh no. Temptation's all you, pet. Always up on tip-toes, grabbing this thing out of this cabinet and that thing out of that, clambering on counters in this absolutely appalling muggle attire." 

Her hands gave a pointed squeeze. 

Hermione felt her face go crimson. She pouted through it. "I thought you liked my jeans." 

The fingers began to stray upwards, right up to the lip of the pocket, then crept down again, and Hermione's thighs began to tremble. 

"I do," Bella purred. "Excellent leverage. Excellent view. Excellent for helping you hop up backwards onto the kitchen table, to undo that zipper, tangle them down around your ankles while I—"

"Hush!" Hermione protested, clapping a hand over her mouth as she laughed. She could feel Bella's smirk against her palm and the pinch her left hand delivered made her jump, knees thudding dully against their poor squash even as it freed Bellatrix's lips again. 

"Cute," she drawled, rubbing her thumb in a circle over the skin she'd just pinched. 

Hermione had the fleeting thought she needed to invest in some thicker denim, some real farm-woman work pants, but then again... she sure didn't need them for warmth. She was several shades of crimson and steam already. 

"Don't tell me you're still nervous about  _watching eyes_  when the nearest neighbors are five acres over the cliff and down the beach." 

"Yes, well. We do get  _unexpected visitors_ ," she reminded her. "And besides," she threw out the word, pointed and sure. "You haven't distracted me that easily." 

The threat of nails in response was thankfully somewhat spoiled by the  _just enough_  thickness of the pocket backing. It only earned a shiver, and Hermione could finish what she'd been trying to say all along. 

"You. Me. This pumpkin—" She gave it another healthy thump with her kneecap. "—and the kitchen. Tonight." She bit her lower lip. "You can lick anything you'd like that doesn't have to go in the bread..." 

She even paused for Bellatrix's raised eyebrow. 

"Anything, she says?" 

Mmm, there went the nails again. 

"A-anything," she agreed as innocently as she could. "However." She stood fully at last, pointedly extracting Bellatrix's hands and holding them tightly in her own. "Should you try to change the terms of this bargain  _one more time..."_ Her grip tightened. "...or should  _anything_  you get up to threaten to burn what I'm baking, so help me I will have you in that kitchen all night. I will start from scratch. I will make it  _perfect_. And I'll have you wearing nothing but the flannel over-shirt Brently left in the mudroom after dinner last week while I do it." 

Bellatrix's eyes narrowed. "You wouldn't." 

Hermione squared her jaw and withdrew her hands. 

"Think you'll be less distracted while I'm half dressed?" 

She tried to keep her lips from twitching. "Unlikely, but I might keep us in that nice-smelling kitchen a very, very long time, burning a very many things before you get to eat one bit of it." 

She peered at Hermione through slits. "If you do, I will tell him just what you did with his shirt the next time you bring him round for dinner. That boy will be scarred." 

Oh, she would, too. Hermione knew it. 

"He'll recover," she said. 

He'd survived the first invitation, after all. He'd even invited himself round again. Her twitchy intern-turned-assistant was hardier than he looked. 

Bellatrix looked the tiniest bit impressed, and a great deal more intrigued. "In that case," she said, rising in a rustle of skirts over complimentarily rustling leaves. She resumed her full height with a posture of command that utterly upended Hermione's teasing confidence from the last several minutes, like the coin of the universe flipping heads-ways again. "You have yourself a bargain, pet." 

She stuck out a hand as though to shake on it, but when Hermione accepted the gesture, she snared her by the wrist, lifted their joined hands towards her, and licked a slow, pointed line up the center of Hermione's palm. 

Ah. So that's how things would be played, then. 

"Take all the time you need." 


	6. Be Careful What You Wish For; I'll Do Anything You Say

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This one came from prompts (ty and dedications, angel and quelquun) listed in the end notes.

When Hermione slumped through the door at quarter to midnight, Bellatrix had her feet up on the table and a crumpled cereal bar wrapper on either side of her heels. She didn’t turn to greet her.

“There you are.”

“Did you save me one of those?” she asked, voice pinched and thin.

Bootheels slid slowly off the wood. She spun her chair sideways with a frown, legs scraping against the floor. Hermione kept her chin turned, face only half towards the light. She tried to circle to the cold cabinet at an even pace, but Bellatrix was out of her chair with narrowed eyes well before she’d gotten her hands on the bag of frozen peas.

“What’s happened?”

“I— It’s nothing, Bella. I’m—”

Bellatrix crossed the floor before she could get out, “—fine.” Her hand caught Hermione’s wrist. She dropped the peas as she flinched, tried to look even farther over her left shoulder and away, but Bellatrix caught her chin. Turned her back.

She focused on even breathing. Forced herself to keep her eyes open, to meet Bellatrix’s own. “See?” she whispered. “Fine.”

“Drop it.”

She bit her bottom lip. “Already did?” she tried, gesturing vaguely towards the peas on the floor so Bellatrix would feel her wrist move in her grasp.

“Drop the _spell_.” Her hand squeezed.

“I don’t—”

“Do not lie to me.” Her voice was low, dark, and deadly. “I can feel it on you. I can always feel your magic, pet.”

With a tiny sound, an indeterminate whimper, Hermione closed her eyes and rinsed away the concealing charm with a wash of pale steel blue.

Even that little magic made her knees go to rubber. She swayed, reached blindly to brace herself against the still-open door to the chill-charmed cabinet. Instead, Bellatrix caught her, tugged her close by the wrist until her forehead was slumped against her shoulder, steadying her breathing against black cloth over skin that smelled groundingly of fire ghosts and green, growing things.

“It looks worse than it is,” she whispered.

Curls brushed against her cheek as Bellatrix shook her head. “Who, pet.” Her voice was cold with fury. “You give me a name and so help me I will—”

“No.”

Bellatrix stiffened. Keeping tight hold of both shoulders, she pushed Hermione back, put the full wash of bruising in the light. She knew what Bellatrix was seeing. She’d spent hours in a Ministry washroom, trying to wait long enough for her magic to feel less pinched and overused, to wait long enough that she could heal away the blood-dark purple, blue, and green crushed across her cheekbone, the ring-clipped tear by the crease of her eye, the split corner of her lip. But she’d used too much already. She’d hardly regained the stamina to safely Apparate home. And as much as she didn’t want Bellatrix to see her like this, she couldn’t let anyone else see it, either.

She risked the try of hiding it. Even the illusion of unblemished skin flickered, a spill of flesh-tone oil over a polluted lake, sickly mixing of pink and green and blue under the dim lights over the washroom mirror. She had to wait another half hour for it to settle. Her stomach, too. At last, hardly trusting it to hold, she’d braced herself against the peeling paint over the nearest cheery-peach stall door, and then spun herself off towards home.

That she landed unharmed in the garden was miracle enough. She’d been aiming right for their upstairs bathroom. Miracle and curse, though, because then she had to stumble up the path, pray the concealment charm would hold, and walk past Bellatrix in the kitchen.

Oh, she shouldn’t have bothered. Bellatrix was never going to let her slip by in this state.

“Who did this?” she asked again.

“It’ll be gone by morning.”

Bellatrix growled. She wrapped an arm around Hermione’s waist, pulled them thigh-to thigh, stomach to stomach, so she could lean her back and free a hand without letting her go. “By morning.” Her fingers raised to the discoloration. She ran her thumb across her cheekbone, fingers buzzing an inch from Hermione’s lips with barely-contained rage. She pressed with restrained care into the hollow where her jaw hinged, a hiss covering Hermione’s whimper.

She saw sparks. Yep, she’d guessed something had cracked or popped or fractured in there.

Bella’s jaw was clenched tight.

Her fingers felt cool and mostly pleasant against her skin, but the sense of old violence brewing new set her teeth on edge. Hermione had the eerily clear thought that Bellatrix was poised on a knife-edge, a second from the instinct to dig her claws into Hermione’s wounds, torture a confession out of her, a warm-up to whatever ill she intended for the one who’d done it to her in the first place, and the instinct that said not to, that said she’d hurt Hermione enough for a lifetime. That unsheathing claws now would hurt her, too.

The tip of one finger lingered in the crease by her eye. Hermione could feel her caress on a sliver of the internal layers of skin that were not supposed to be touched, where half-dried blood lay open to the air. She blinked, bruise folding around her. Bella’s hand jerked away.

She plucked out her wand with a muffled curse. “By _morning_ ,” she scoffed again. “As though I would let you— As if you’re the only one who can—”

Then her fingers slid back to Hermione’s cheek, her wand just shifting through her hair, and as it brushed against her with an idle turn of Bella’s wrist, her skin tingled itself alive again.

“Oh,” Hermione whispered.

Her grip shifted. She half carried, half dragged Hermione backwards until she was leaning against, not quite sitting on, the table. She instinctively clutched the edge. Bella’s hands fell away. She pressed lips against the bruise instead, channeling the dizzy warmth of healing with her breath and the brush of feather-rage kisses over her cheek, down to the corner of her lip, over to the aching place behind her jaw. Her lips sent searing sparks of undoing straight through every inch of her, an impossible tide of _soothed, bettered, washed clean_ all wrapped up in a wilder want of _cured by fire._ The deeper thing, the broken thing, some unhappy bit of bone trembled inside her like a livewire and burst through her blood like sunrise had come six hours early, and every glowing inch of it was Bellatrix’s magic inside of her.

Another strangled gasp ripped from her lungs as Bellatrix’s hands came down on hers, each of them points of the same unrestrained energy. She wasn’t trying to control this healing, finesse it into the all-but-faded wounds. She was flooding her with it, hurt to hand to head, and when her lips pressed suddenly to Hermione’s, heat on heat, she froze, fell out of herself and out of pain and into Bellatrix’s kiss and…

 _“Who?_ ”

With the question breathed straight into her lungs, she almost let it in without realizing, without remembering she had an answer she wasn’t ready to spill into Bellatrix in this wash of warmth and light. She shook her head with a whimper. All at once, Bellatrix let her go.

“I didn’t want to resort to this. But you leave me no choice.”

How she could sound so hard, so sure, so focused while Hermione still gasped against the table, struggled to get her eyes open, touch her healed-clean cheek with shaking fingertips, she couldn’t begin to understand. Before she could even check the hinge of her jaw, another spell spilled from the tip of Bellatrix’s wand in an and under-breath needle of power.

She jerked as she felt it slip across her tongue and sidle beneath her skin. Cool where the healing had been warm. Slick and calming where the last had been spark-sharp and rousing, waking. She knew this spell.

Bella’s voice suddenly sounded as heavy as fate. “What happened?”

Hermione felt the tug at truth, words beginning to slip through cracks and into the air without her permission, but as easily as though she’d wanted to give them up anyway. “An elf came in to work today for one of my interviews. Kibsey. I’ve scheduled and rescheduled with him a half-dozen times, always cancelled, always at the last minute, always with ‘Humblest apologies, missus. A matter is come up with the Master.’

“Then today, at last, a quarter of an hour late, he shows up. And oh, Bella, if you’d have seen him— Skin and bones, and what skin there was was— He has him punish himself with _boiling water_ , Bella. If he’s slow, a foot. Clumsy, a hand. Impolite, his— his face, his ears. And elf skin is— its very— They’re hardly built for sunlight let alone… He was covered head to toe in burns and blisters and— and—”

“You healed him.”

Hermione’s chin jerked up and down.

Bellatrix huffed. “No wonder you’ve as much power as a newborn squib. Healing creat— other _species_ will drain you dry.” She shook her head. Twitched her wand, sending a cool curl gliding up and down Hermione’s throat. “What then?”

Hermione struggled against it, tried to shape the power of the honesty charm at least enough to answer only what was asked, protect the rest. “I went to report his master to the regulatory board. That’s all I was going to do. That should have been enough. But then, he— he had a message to deliver. He knew, Bella. People know where you are. Who I am.”

“What message?” Her eyes were sharp, intent. She would not allow Hermione to stall, now.

It spilled from her in a pained rush. “‘Every day your Death Eater lives, the elf boils ten seconds longer.’”

Bellatrix’s nostrils flared.

“So I handled it myself!” Hermione gasped out. “If I waited on the board, if I let him go home, he—”  

“So you _what?”_

“I went there! I had Kibsey bring me with him!”

“Half dead with healing?”

“Yes! But I— I had a plan, Bella, I—”

“What! Tell me! What plan, in what world, would excuse jaunting off after some piteous house-elf to the home of a deranged wizard who _clearly_ wants to see you—”

“Your plan!” Hermione gasped, eyes stinging. “Yours! I took his magic!”

For an instant, Bellatrix froze, shock overtaking the look of fury painted all across her face.

“And it worked! Without it, there was nothing between them, no tie. Nothing to mark ownership, no magic bloodline to bind a servant to. The moment I touched his magic, Kibsey was free. And I— I told him if he, if he _ever_ tried anything like that again, if he told anyone about it, if his _friends_ ever tried the same — if he thought he could threaten us by torturing an innocent — thought old ties to the Order should excuse _anything_ like this in the name of— of— Well, then he’d never get it back.”

Hermione squeezed her eyes shut. She ran nervous fingers down behind her jaw. “And... then he hit me.” She shook her head. “I know, I was… It was careless, and I really should’ve known better than to forget that… it isn’t just a wand that makes a wizard dangerous. But he tried to spell me, then, and when it didn’t work, when he realized what I’d said was every bit the truth… That was it, Bella. He was so terrified he got down on his knees and begged for another chance. It’s done. It’s _done_.”

Breathing sharp and fast through her nose, Bellatrix’s stare skittered between emotions Hermione had gotten painfully good at latching onto in the last several months. The lot of it was drenched in near-murderous rage, but there was fear there, too, and the littlest bit of pride.

“I’d have almost like to see that,” she murmured. Licked her lips. Then, she shook her head, visibly shed the panic, banished the fear in a shiver of curls and a narrowing of darkening eyes, and embraced her rage again. “Sheer blind hubris, pet. _Careless_. Harebrained, half-witted, half-baked _plan_. And no plan of mine!”

Her wand jerked, cruelly punctuating each word. Hermione felt the honesty spell tighten. Cool, smooth coils of it raced down her spine, priming her tongue. She did not want to send Bella’s wrath chasing after her own, but it seemed less and less likely she would outlast the spell without giving up a name.

“That you would you do something so _utterly imbicilic_ as to go out there and almost get yourself killed? _Why would you do something so pointless?”_

“Because I love you.”

Oh. Hermione clamped down on her jaw so hard she felt the give of her teeth against each other. Oh _God._ That was not a final demand for where to turn her rage. That was not the question Bellatrix had meant to ask. Oh, they were _both_ going to regret that it was the one she did.

Bellatrix visibly blanched. “You don’t.”

The spell itched, but Hermione was able to swallow it, because that was not a question. She unknotted her incisors to whisper, “Take this off.”

But Bellatrix didn’t seem to hear. “You _don’t_ ,” she hissed.

“It’s your spell!” Hermione flung at her, face hot, eyes stinging. All at once, every minute of the endless, adrenaline-shot whiplash of a day caught up with her and she wished she’d just curled up on any old surface in the Ministry and slept through till the sun like she used to as a cleaner, like any other graveyard shift, exhausted but blessedly, utterly alone in the world, no one to look at her like Bellatrix was looking at her now, like something beneath even pity. “Take it off!”

When Bellatrix just kept staring, Hermione forced her eyes closed, rooted deep into the tiny bit of strength Bella’s healing had returned to her, and flung herself into the spell between them, found the thread of honesty that wrapped Bellatrix’s commands around her tongue, and burnt it to a crisp.

She collapsed to her knees, pushing Bellatrix away as she fell, hands against the floorboards, gasping, almost gagging. Her head spun. A stunt pulled on borrowed power, more than she had to spare. The place she’d burnt out the charm felt like a charred hole somewhere deep inside her. She pressed her forehead against the cool floor, trying not to let any more tears slip out than the ones she’d lost in the first flash of pain.

“Hermione.”

Her name sounded garbled, strained, and strange above her. It was almost never said between them. She gave Bella her name almost always. Bella gave her ‘pet’ or nothing at all. Of course they didn’t speak of love. She always knew if she gave it, Bella would wrap her up in it like a leash of thorns, then pluck them out one-by-one in bite after bite of painful denials until she even stopped believing it for herself.

“Don’t,” she rasped. A crumb of something she could only hope was no worse than a bit of cereal bar stuck to her lip. She could see several long, orange hairs nearby. She wished she’d taken the time to dust over the weekend, wished she’d mopped the floor. But Bellatrix had snagged her after the lunch dishes and whisked her away upstairs and they hadn’t returned till the next day’s breakfast. That was easy. Always easy, between them. Bellatrix stealing her away from responsibility and stealing her words in a rush of touch and passion and power. Words had never gotten easy. Months and months of this, and words were always hard.

Bellatrix sank down beside her. She sat directly on the floor, skirts splayed, hands wrapped around loosely bent knees. Fur puffed away, skittering in all directions. She didn’t reach out.

Hermione braced for the next denial, insult, rejection. Silence, head-spinning, dizzy-ringing, stomach-riot silence. She might collapse completely, soon. She would never make it upstairs like this, not on her own.

“I want him to _hurt_.”

Oh, no, not that again. Better, worse? Worse, she decided, if she had to deal with the indignity of what she’d just said  and it didn’t even draw Bellatrix off the warpath. What did she even care who’d hurt her. What right did she have to care when _she_ was the one who could make her feel like… She squeezed her eyes shut _hard_. ...like this.

“It’s done,” she forced out again. “Let it be done. Please.”

“It’s… not,” Bellatrix said, voice very soft, the lilting edge of falling off into half-song, or madness. “He should pay. Blood for blood.”

Hermione shook her head. Bad. She pushed down hard on her own hands to distract from nausea. Curled fingertips clawed against the wood; grains and cracks fighting callouses.

“Why won’t you let me have this?”

She let out a pained gasp of a laugh. “Because it’s done! Because no one can know!” She heaved in a breath, let it out slower, fighting exhaustion and pain, gathering her fear into fire. “You think this will last if they do? You think we can hide out on the edge of this world forever, one foot in, one out, if you start carving people up again? You think if someone realizes all it takes to lure you into… into vengeance is getting me a little bruised, I’ll ever be able to leave the house again?”

Bellatrix’s torso tilted side to side. She let out a little hum. Considering. “Not so bad, that.”

“Oh, don’t you _dare_.” The words tugged at the burnt edges. She saw spots.

So much for healing. She needed _sleep_.

Bellatrix grumbled inaudibly. Without warning, she flattened out her legs, reached over, and tipped Hermione sideways by the shoulder. She slumped over Bellatrix’s thighs with a gasp, the whole world spinning around her. By the time she could tell which way was up again, Bella had maneuvered her head properly into her lap, neck cushioned on her thigh.

Heaped together on the kitchen floor, her hands slid into Hermione’s hair, staring down at her with a bemused, cagy little half-smile. “You did have a plan, then.” Trickles of warmth spilled from her fingertips. It wasn’t so much healing; she wasn’t hurt anymore, not physically, but it soothed the edges of the hole, lulled at the aching emptiness where her energy, her magic should be full and waiting.

She couldn’t keep her eyes open. As much as she wanted walls up, defenses ready, everything about this plied her towards vulnerability.

“I still want to know.”

“No.”

“Don’t you trust me?” she murmured, fingertips gliding from the hairline at her temple back behind her ears, trailing tingles and heat.

“No.”

She hummed out a laugh, then, and Hermione felt it in her magic, the warmth suddenly champagne-bubble gold and lighter than air.

In its wake, all heat vanished in an emptying rush. Bellatrix’s touch was just touch, and even that slowed, stilled.

“You’re smart, pet,” she whispered. Her palm pressed flat against Hermione’s cheek. “Too smart to love me.”

Reluctantly, Hermione opened her eyes. She stared up into the face leaning over her, into eyes that would not meet her own, close enough she could see the tiny pink veins that ran inward from each corner towards the shifting landscape of blacks at their heart “Your spell,” she reminded her. “Not to mention you called me an imbecile not ten minutes ago.”  

Bellatrix’s frown held less anger. More fear. “You’re not saying it again.”

Hermione laughed through her nose. “Merlin, no. Do you think I have a death wish?”

The tiniest sparkle skittered between their skin, more light than warmth. Gone as quickly as it had come.

“I don’t want that from you.”

Hermione opened her mouth, then closed it again.

“I don’t want you to… I don’t want that. I never wanted…”

“I know.” It hurt a little bit, saying it, but she did. She wanted to keep tossing out the lightest words she could find, earn another bit of stardust magic fed into her skin by Bellatrix’s rock-skipping mess of a mood, but exhaustion was making that difficult. All but impossible. Exhaustion fed realer things, the instinct to spill one’s guts all across the midnight confessions floorboards with cereal bar crumbs and Crookshanks’s cat fur. She swallowed down three kinds of self pity before she managed words. “Do you think I wanted it? Do you think I wanted to _say_ it?”

Bellatrix was slow to answer. “I… think you did.”

Hermione stiffened. Tightened her stomach to lurch an inch off her thighs.

Bellatrix set a hand against her chest and pressed her back down.

“I think you go looking for it. Mangy cats. Beaten-down elves. A fucked up house full of fucked up witches. I think you go looking for things to fix. I don’t think you know that’s not love.”

“That isn’t—”

“Or maybe it is.” Bellatrix’s voice had faded almost out of hearing. “In which case, you will fail. And then you won’t anymore.”

Hermione shivered. “What?” she whispered, though she knew the answer. She suddenly needed Bellatrix to say it. Needed to know she’d thought it. Needed to know it meant something to her, too.

“Love me.” Emptily said, it almost hurt to hear. “I can’t be fixed, pet.”

Brim-full silence hung, loomed above and around them, a raincloud threatening to spill over. The mood had stopped skipping. Hermione closed her eyes tight against the instinct, the threat to sink. She swallowed down the thunderstorm. And she let out only the thinnest, realest words she had, the quiet kind that should have drowned in a moment like this, chin up at a sky full of strangled-back floods left to cling to and collect one another for so long without being spoken. “Or maybe that means I’ll love you forever.”

Bellatrix made a choked sound. It started like drowning, then became a bit like laughter. “Terrifying,” she muttered.

Hermione gasped out an echo of Bella’s grim laugh, an echo of a squall. “Merlin, isn’t it just.”

She felt as Bellatrix’s stare turned appraising. It was a shift in the air and a shift in her skirts all at once. She looked up. Sure enough, eyes on her. A special kind of wonder. Rare and not-at-all childlike, Bella’s wonder was. Hermione had never seen it anywhere else. She suspected it came from something in the depths of having given up, at one point or another, in the world having anything surprising left to offer, let alone anything good. It sprang out of jaded, out of apathy, sprouted fresh and green and blooming from bones in soil dry as ash, and everytime Hermione saw it, it sped her heart.

“I think I do love you,” she admitted. “It scares me.”

And Bellatrix stared at her for another wondering moment, then sighed and wrapped arms around her shoulders — pulled her close into her chest — held her tight and hard and cradled against the crook of her neck like she’d smother the fear right out of her — but all she did was hum. A low, uneasy melody that shivered over the top of Hermione’s head one haunted note after another until she realized she wasn’t crying anymore — She’d been crying, hadn’t she? — just in time to drift … fingers carding through her hair … away from conscious thoughts … into a drained and dizzy half-dream where their home was lit by bulbs of captured blue lightning and thunder rumbled loose between Bella’s lips as she hummed, wrapped head-to-toe in thorns and brambles, lips still and closed and in a voice more a child’s than her own, _Love me however, speak of it never, and maybe we’ll stay just like this, forever._

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _\- what Bellatrix would do were Hermione the one hurt by another_   
>  _\- truth charm thing where Hermione says ‘I love you’ by mistake and it gets awkward and angsty._


End file.
